Béatrice Cussol
les parties
The Abattoirs' Library hosts an exhibition dedicated to Béatrice Cussol. Renowned for her drawings, the artist (born in Toulouse in 1970) is invited to occupy the venue, as well as presenting a collection on books, including her novels and some of her collage notebooks, acquired last year by Les Abattoirs.
Béatrice Cussol has developed a political practice of drawing. She reappropriates the hobby of watercolour painting – by women and “Sunday painters”, etc. – to further the feminist cause. She notably borrows from watercolours the lightness of its forms in order to transform it into an expressive or even expressionistic and transgressive medium. The rosy softness of watercolour contrasts with the coarseness of the scenes, both elegant and explicit, volatile and profound, light yet directed, funny yet unsettling. Based on drawing, her art practice also extends to fabric and literature. She is also a novelist and has been writing a story in images for several years now in her notebooks, which bring together magazine clippings based on her influences, anger, history in action, and so on. The project that she is presenting at Les Abattoirs makes the connection between the various facets of Béatrice Cussol’s work for the first time, by combining drawings, image notebooks, and novels.
A graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice in 1993, Béatrice Cussol lives and works in Malakoff. Well known for her figurative drawings that stage women in dreamlike realms thwarting feminine clichés (witches, eroticism, etc.), she has also published five books Merci (2000) and Pompon (2001) with Éditions Balland, as well as Diane? (2003), Sinon (2007), and Les Souffleuses (2009) with Éditions Léo Scheer. Present in Swiss and French public collections, her work has been the subject of monographic (Villa Arson, Nice; Mamco, Geneva; Centre d’art de Neuchâtel, etc.) and collective exhibitions (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart; Musée des Beaux-arts de Dôle; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; Centre d’art La Criée, Rennes, etc., as well as at the Pavillon Blanc in Colomiers within the framework of Le Printemps de Septembre in 2016). She was a resident of the Villa Médicis from 2009 to 2010 and currently teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.
Exhibition in association with Le Printemps de Septembre.